


Scrape Your Knees

by dustbunnyprophet



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Chris has issues, Dysfunctional Relationships, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, I mean c'mon this is Chris we're talking about, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Jealousy, M/M, Mild Language, Past Christophe Giacometti/Victor Nikiforov, Pining, Sexual Content, Smut, Unhealthy Relationships, Unrequited Love, brief Christophe Giacometti/Phichit Chulanont, poor Masumi-san
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 16:13:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11016939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustbunnyprophet/pseuds/dustbunnyprophet
Summary: The road to love was a winding gravel path, and Mathieu had felt it scrape his skin. But it had never stopped him. He had trudged on in spite of his better judgement. And if his heart clenched every time Chris left with another man, every time he flirted his way through a conversation, Mathieu swallowed it down, enduring. Hoping.Until one day, Mathieu no longer could.Chris was a broken doll. His strings fell limp, but he just kept smiling, and winking, chewing day after day and swallowing down bile. Hiding the grey that filled his vision.Silvery grey. Like his medals. Like Victor’s hair.A story of wandering, of losing oneself. A story of finding love.





	Scrape Your Knees

_ January, Stockholm _

 

The lights shone blindingly off the ice. Cheers and applauses were cascading from the stands along with flowers and plushies. And the roar of the crowd which enveloped Chris, muffled the breakneck thrum of his heart in his ears. He heaved a breath, forcing his body to bend into a bow. Then his lips curled into the crowd-pleasing grin he had long perfected. 

Never before had Chris been so glad for his innate ability to wink his way out of everything. Smoke and mirrors, and the right sway of his hips and everyone forgot they had questions to ask. They only saw the gluttony for pleasure, the chiselled eros smiling with no care in the world. And the cracks in his chest remained there, hidden in plain sight. Even when the dark curdled blood trickled out into his movements, and his skates carved a story far different from what it was supposed to be. Even then, they did not see past the sweat dripping from his forehead, the ecstasy of his half lidded gaze, and the way his mouth parted slightly. They did not see the emptiness that gaped inside. Nor the swell of emotions which suffocated him slowly, like a silken rope digging into his throat.

They saw what Chris wanted them to see. They followed the seducing sway of his body as he skated a couple of laps around the rink, blowing kisses and throwing winks like breadcrumbs. In the flutter of wings they did not see the hand feeding them. 

He picked a bouquet of red roses and then glided towards the exit. An embrace to his coach, kisses on his choreographer’s cheeks, a pleased smile when he was presented with another bouquet from the latter, a wink that held a promise of later. The kiss and cry.

Chris was a broken doll, but no one saw the strings falling limp, and the suspension of disbelief sailed them peacefully, all of them. No one asked questions, no one saw anything, and Chris lingered.

The scores appeared on the screen. A personal best that put him in first place for the time being. He moved the muscles in his cheeks and the beaming smile he had aimed for blossomed on his lips. A couple more kisses blown towards the camera. The trademark wink. 

He moved on autopilot, changing out of his skates, and throwing on his red and white Team Switzerland jacket. A few words with the press, empty and yet delivered with such conviction no one noticed. No one ever noticed.

And Chris had to wonder if he wanted them to. He never had before. But then, he had spent so long pretending he had started to believe the glamour was truly his skin. 

It had always been just sex. With everyone. Always. And even if many things about him were as fake as the blond tint of his hair, this one was earnest. Chris had never believed in romance. He had friends, friends with benefits, casual hook-ups, nameless strangers sharing a couple of hours of bliss. And it was enough. It had never rung hollow in the emptiness beneath his breastbone.

Emotions made everything so complicated. They twisted something so simple and beautiful as the act of providing each other pleasure into a knotwork of expectations and disappointments. They ruined everything.

And yet everyone craved them, latching onto the illusion of a happily ever after. 

He zipped his jacket up and walked towards the stands to watch the rest of the competition. No one was paying attention to him and he slipped in the last row, sprawling casually over the seat. Nothing unusual, nothing which might clue an observant bystander that something was profoundly wrong. That Chris had not been the same since the GPF.

It had been an ugly epiphany to have, standing there half naked on the roof of the hotel, the brisk winter air of Barcelona concealing the shiver of apprehension that had shook him when the notion had hit home. When all of a sudden Chris had realised he had been fooling himself for years. He had plastered his most convincing smile on his lips and sat down on the edge of the pool, teasing Victor, and offering to take a selfie, acting like good old Chris acted. Giving no inkling to the silver-haired skater that somewhere along the way he had become more than a handsome body to share pleasure with. 

Nekola’s results appeared on the screen, and the announcer called the next competitor. A moment later Popovich was stepping onto the ice, and Chris shook his head, seeing the irony of the moment. He could clearly recall the wave of schadenfreude that had washed over him at the Cup of China when Popovich had carved the ice with all of Chris’ arguments against romance.

The music started and Chris paid attention nonetheless. He respected the older skater even if his lips were curled in a half-mocking smirk of amusement. Popovich started moving, tracing lines of heartbreak across the ice, carving all the desperate and self-destructive rage of a scorned lover. And Chris knew exactly how this routine looked. He had seen it enough time to understand it. To see the stupidity of betting everything on something so fickle like love. 

So why was his smirk suddenly crumbling? Why did he feel every jump like a sucker punch to the teeth, why did the clotted lump of bleeding thoughts he refused to face, suddenly slap him in the face? Why did his fingers dig in the soft fabric of his jacket, and when had the silken rope around his neck turned into a slipknot?

Popovich kept skating, screaming his emotions on the ice and looking for absolution from the hatred even as he painted it in sharp smears. The music followed him, rising and falling with the story the Russian was sobbing out. And Chris struggled to keep his facade. Because he could feel it, feel it all. Everything he had locked away for the past six weeks. Everything he had no reason to feel. Everything he  _ refused  _ to feel.

But it was there, digging into his skin. Or maybe it was his nails biting into the flesh of his palm. Maybe it was his heart beating like a sledgehammer, pushing dark blood through his veins. Making him hate himself. 

Hate Victor for existing. Hate Popovich for telling the truth. Hate himself for being a fool.

 

Four hours later Chris was lying on his bed, gasping as a wave of pleasure seared through him. The current was building into something between bliss and a scream. Suddenly his vision went white. And then his body was jerking sharply as everything exploded. Disappearing. Burning out in the aftershocks as his hips fell down on the mattress. 

He hissed as the sweaty body above him moved, leaving him suddenly empty. 

And wasn’t it fitting, he thought bitterly, even as a warm cloth was washing the stickiness away from his stomach. Chris’ eyes were still closed while Mathieu worked. His choreographer was always too gentle in the aftercare. It almost annoyed Chris, but Mathieu was undeniably a fantastic fuck. It was worth having to endure the nearly affectionate way he treated him. The flowers. The dinners out. The way he looked at Chris sometimes, when he thought Chris was not seeing him.

He opened his eyes, looking at the former ice dancer who had just dropped the washcloth on the floor, and lay on his side next to him. A lock of brown hair fell on his sweaty forehead, and Chris looked at it, and the way Mathieu’s green eyes were sleepily gazing at him.

A better man would have dated him. Or broken off their arrangement. But Chris was not a good man. He let his eyelids drop once again, obscuring the view. It was easier to pretend Mathieu  _ had not _ developed an attachment to him. That Chris’ lax attitude towards sex did not make a tinge of hurt appear in his green eyes. 

It was easier then having to face the guilt which simmered in the back of his throat.

He couldn’t even pity the former ice dancer. After all how was he any different from Chris? Wasn’t he yearning for someone who could never reciprocate his feelings as well?

Chris swallowed, feeling his stomach fill with lead. And Mathieu must have noticed it because suddenly there were fingers in his hair, and while it felt good, Chris wanted nothing but to flinch away. Because Mathieu had feelings for him Chris was unable to reciprocate. Feelings he  _ didn’t want _ to reciprocate. And it was fucked up. This whole situation was fucked up, and he didn’t like any of it. Not his feelings for Victor, nor the way Mathieu was slowly curling around him, the hand moving down from his hair to wrap itself across his midsection. 

Sex was supposed to be easy, to be featherlight. It was not supposed to drag him down rocky slopes, and feel bruised and battered deep in the soul.

It was supposed to be pleasure. 

And nothing more.

He felt a kiss being dropped on the top of his head, and it took all of his willpower not to jump to his feet and run away from that room, as fast as he could. Chris may be a bad man, but he was not cruel. He didn’t want to break Mathieu’s heart. 

Because now he knew how much it hurt.

 

_ February, Lausanne _

 

The sky was overcast, a dull grey muting the glare of the snow-covered rooftops. Mathieu looked from the window of his apartment, sipping a cup of scorchingly hot tea. The lights were off, and he let the shy winter light fill the spacious living room. He wondered if it was going to snow again. February snows were not that uncommon in Lausanne. 

In his adopted hometown.

He smiled wryly, looking at the city he had spent more than two decades living in. He had been eight years old when he had left his small hometown in the Swiss Alps. And back then it had been like ripping a piece of himself away. Leaving his family, his childhood friends, his whole life to move in with an aunt and start a serious training regimen. But it had paid off in the end. There were countless medals and an Olympic gold hanging in a glass display behind him. Mathieu had a well paid job in the Swiss Skating Federation, and produced enough choreographies to satisfy the artistic side of him. It should have made him feel happy, fulfilled. 

And yet he felt oddly lonely. 

It had been five years since his retirement, and while he missed his ice dancing partner with an ache that resembled too much the way he had used to long for his hometown, Mathieu knew he had gotten already used to Céline’s absence. She was not the reason why he felt a sigh building deep inside him. He shook his head, letting the curtain fall back over the window and setting the tea down on his coffee table. Mathieu was too old to try and fool himself. He knew the reason why he felt so down was the same one which had him acting against his better judgement. It was Chris. 

It was always Chris.

How long had this been going on, a year and a half? Nearly two? He should have learned by now, he should have known better. And yet Mathieu kept going back, ever and always. He kept trying, hoping one day Chris would wake up and truly  _ see  _ him. Because for all of the mind-blowing sex they had had, Chris had never truly looked at him as more than someone to spend a couple of hours with. And do his choreographies to boot. 

He felt his lips curl into a grimace. 

It was masochism at its purest form, chasing him and longing. Feeling like shit when he saw Chris flirt with other men, take them to his room. It was always a slap on the face. And each time Mathieu promised himself he would avoid the skater. He would do his job as a choreographer and no more than that.

Every time he ended up curling around Chris’s naked body in the afterglow. And an aching emptiness would gape where excitement and arousal had simmered only minutes before. 

He was a pathetic man.

But those long lashes framing Chris’s hazel eyes left him weak, so weak. And it never took much more than a pointed look, and that small smile on his lips to beckon him. There was something almost holy in the way the younger man came undone, in the abandon with which he embraced every thrust, every slide of skin on skin. In the moans that spilled freely, tangling Mathieu deeper and deeper in  a web of emotions he should have never allowed himself to feel.

Emotions that did not vanish with the drying of sweat in hotel beds. And as time passed they grew harder and harder to manage. Because Chris was like the ever changing spring sky. Never standing still, and yet too beautiful to tear his eyes away. The way he skated, the curve of his body as it transcended the music, painting the ice with more passion than one man could endure. 

Maybe it was that which always pulled Mathieu back to him. The knowledge that even if he stopped sleeping with him, his heart would not slow down its pace when he saw him, when he admired the way he turned his choreographies into something breathtaking.

Nothing short of quitting that particular job would be enough, and Mathieu was not ready to do that. Not  _ ever. _ There were other skaters he choreographed for, but no one did justice to his routines the way Chris did. No one made them into something bigger than skating. 

Chris gave them life.

He closed his eyes, leaning back into the cushions of the sofa. Were things ever going to change? Or was he going to linger there until Chris retired and Mathieu stopped being a permanent fixture in his life? 

It was not going to be a long time anyway, he thought bitterly, feeling his stomach constrict. Chris had two more seasons in his knees at best. Maybe three. But no more than that. And afterwards…

He swallowed, opening his eyes and heaving a breath out. He was  _ not  _ going to think about that.

Mathieu got up from the sofa and switched the light on. All this idle musing was doing him no good. They had one more competition before the season was done, and he needed to start thinking about the next season. He needed to make a selection of music to present to Chris, so the skater could pick one and Mathieu could start working on it.

 

 

_ March, Shanghai _

 

The dim light of the bedside lamp cast an orange glow on the wall, and Chris looked at it for a moment, gazing at the shadows that rocked back and forth on it. It was not the first time he had sex with Phichit. The younger Thai skater had an easy charisma about him, and the way he approached sex was the same with which he approached everything else - with a smile. 

The World Championship was going to start in two days, and Chris had been enjoying the silence before the storm, and the fact he could do whatever he wished without having to worry about his nightly activities impeding his skating. Phichit had felt the same. So a couple of drinks later they had been going up to Chris’s room, chatting amiably before they had closed the door to the hotel room, and Chris had been pushed against it by the much shorter man. He had grinned, letting him take charge, while he had smoothly pulled his clothes off, one by one.

It was nothing new, nothing unexpected, and there was a comfort in the familiarity. In the knowledge that it was truly nothing more than sex. Phichit’s heart lay elsewhere. And if the impossibility of having his yearning for Yuuri fulfilled juxtaposed with Chris’s no longer newfound emotions for Victor, it was all the better. Neither of them got to have the people they wanted, but at least they had a good fuck.

They were both panting atop the bed, Chris deeply buried inside the Thai, revelling in the sounds that escaped Phichit lips. The moans, the blown pupils in his grey eyes. For all that he was much smaller than Chris, there was strength in those chiselled muscles which rippled under his brown skin. Chris kept increasing the pace, bending Phichit’s legs and lowering himself above him. 

He was about to capture Phichit’s lips in a hungry kiss when the sound of the hotel door opening made him stop mid-thrust. 

His head flew to his right, eyes snapping to the open door. And he froze. He barely had the time to see who was on the other side, because a heartbeat later the door was loudly being shut. And Chris found himself staring at the fake wood, a curse sitting on the brink of his lips as he belatedly remembered. 

He had given Mathieu a spare key card to his room. 

He had given him a key because they were supposed to meet. But instead...

Shit.

“Chris?” Phichit asked, voice uncharacteristically cautious, and he looked at him, only vaguely registering his arousal had waned in the meanwhile. The younger man’s frown had an edge of concern in it.

Chris sat back on his hunches, rubbing his face with his palm. 

“I’m sorry.” he said, feeling a wave of bile mount to his mouth “I forgot I gave him a key.”

But he shouldn’t have. He shouldn’t have let it slip his mind. Because for all that they were fucking with no strings attached, at least on Chris’ part, he knew how Mathieu felt about him. And seeing him balls deep in another man was  _ not  _ something he wanted him to see. It was plain cruel and insensitive. And Chris was many things, but neither of those.

Or at least that was what he told himself to sleep better at night.

He was startled out of his thoughts by Phichit’s movement. The Thai was getting up from the bed, fetching his clothes from the floor and starting to get dressed

“What are you doing?” he asked frowning, but the Thai just gave him a soft smile.

“It’s okay. I gotta get some rest anyway” he said, and threw a wink at him that carried understanding “See you at practice tomorrow?” 

Chris wanted to protest, to insist he stay, but the mood  _ had  _ been ruined. And his stomach churned, and rolled, hellbent on acquainting Chris with as much bile as it could. So he nodded and then got up from the bed. Fetching his robe, he pulled it on before he accompanied the Thai to the door.

“I’m...” he began, but the younger skater just smiled waving him away.

“Don’t think about it.” Phichit said, and then he bid him goodnight.

Chris watched him walk out of the door and leave Chris alone with the taste of bile in his mouth, and a condom stuck to his skin. 

_ “Merde.”  _ he cursed into the empty room, pulling the sagged condom off himself and flinging it into the bin by the desk. Fuck. He walked angrily to the minibar and was about to yank it open, but he had already drunk enough and he had to practice tomorrow. And hangovers were not kind to him. 

Chris ran a hand through his hair. He didn’t even know why he was so upset. It was not like Phichit had been angry. Or disappointed. And honestly it was just sex. So why did he feel like a tidal wave of restless energy was building up inch after inch inside his chest, threatening to choke him?

Why did he feel the urge to kick and scream, and drink himself to sleep? 

He sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed, the robe limply hanging open, and he dropped his head, squeezing his eyes shut. It was all Victor’s fault. He hadn’t been the same since the GPF. It felt like some elementary part of him was missing and the cogs inside him no longer turned the right way. Everything was out of joint, and Chris didn’t even know what he was thinking. 

He was twenty five years old, a couple of seasons from retirement, at best, and he was a mess. Not only had he failed spectacularly at the Grand Prix Finals, but even the one part of his life he was happy with, the part where having sex was fun, and light and easy. Well, even that no longer functioned right. Because none of these people were Victor.

But this, this rising wave of choking  _ something  _ he was feeling now had nothing to do with Victor. And Chris wanted to scream in frustration, and weariness, because how could he no longer understand a whit about himself? How did he get to this point that he sat on the edge of a bed feeling like literal shit. And all just because one of the people he regularly slept with had caught him fucking someone else. 

Chris shook his head, curling his fingers into fists, and digging his nails in the flesh of his palms. He just couldn’t get that image out of his brain. That flicker of a heartbeat in which he had seen Mathieu look at him, and it was not with hurt, or heartbroken.

It was with disappointment. 


End file.
